Wind power industry soars to new heights

By LEE BOWMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Most of the time, farmers have little use for the wind.

They might harness it to pump water for livestock or irrigation, but the harder blows are more likely to flatten crops in fields or steal their soil.

These days, on more acres across the country, a steady wind is like money in the bank - if electricity-generating turbines can catch it.

Wind farming is a reality, or soon will be, in all but about 10 states, offering a "double-cropping" benefit to landowners who can reap thousands of dollars a year for each turbine on their property, along with most of whatever revenue the land was already producing, including agricultural subsidies.

Stretching several hundred feet above the landscape with blades extending the length of a 747's wingspan, today's most advanced windmills typically take up only about 5 percent or 10 percent of the acreage they sit on, mostly in access roads for maintenance crews. The rest can stay as is.

Elwood Gillis, mayor of the southeast Colorado farming town of Lamar, host to 108 industrial-grade windmills, said, "If you stand right under one, there's a little swishing sound," but that neither farmers nor cattle seem to mind them.

"They are clean, they use no water, and they have turned what used to be a curse - the wind - into a blessing," he said.

According to the American Wind Energy Association, a national trade association for the wind energy industry, wind power is expected to generate more than 31 billion kilowatt-hours this year - enough to power some 3 million homes. That's still less than 1 percent of the nation's electrical production capacity.

By some estimates, if wind generation, along with other renewable power sources, could meet a lofty goal of providing 20 percent of the country's electric power, land lease payments for turbines would be worth as much as $1.2 billion a year by 2020.

Most things about wind turbines have gotten bigger and more efficient in the past quarter-century. In 1980, it cost 80 cents for a wind machine to produce one kilowatt-hour of electricity (the way most electric bills charge residential customers).

Now, the rate is about 3 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, with a 2-cent federal tax break factored in. That puts wind on an even or better footing with natural gas in most parts of the country, although still a couple of cents more expensive than coal.

Wind power investors and operators include energy conglomerates such as Edison International, Shell, utilities such as Kansas City Power and Light, and Puget Sound Energy. The biggest player is Florida-based FPL Energy, with 44 wind farms in 15 states that together generate enough electricity to power about 850,000 average households.

The companies also run facilities that generate power from natural gas, oil, coal and water, but they view wind power as a good investment as demand for renewable energy grows.

"The economics of wind become better as other energy costs go up, particularly if the hidden costs of burning carbon-based fuels start to be factored in," said Carol Werner, executive director of the non-partisan Environmental and Energy Study Institute in Washington, D.C.

Add a few tax and market incentives at the state level, as has happened in Texas, to lots of land with steady wind, and wind farming can take off. FPL's opening of the world's largest wind farm, the 47,000-acre, 421 windmill Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center in Taylor and Nolan counties, pushed the Lone Star State ahead of longtime wind leader California as the state with the most wind energy capacity.

Just as important, as windmills have become more efficient at "catching the wind," the machines are more practical to build in parts of the country once dismissed as having winds too weak for commercial investment.

"The technology has vastly improved," said Randall Swisher, executive director of the American Wind Energy Association. "Half of the projects in the upper Midwest are in spots that wouldn't have been considered a decade ago, but developers have gotten better at finding wind hot spots closer to major markets in places like Indiana and Missouri."

With wind-generating capacity increasing at nearly 30 percent a year, companies that make the turbines and generators are starting to invest in American plants to make the equipment, a move more practical because shipping the giant components long distances can add tens of thousands to their costs.

Production facilities for towers, turbines and blades, many of them set in steel and other manufacturing plants abandoned over the past two decades, are open or planned in Iowa, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Louisiana, Colorado and Texas, among others.

"A lot of the state policy on energy is being driven by economic development interests as much as energy needs," said George Sterzinger, director of the Renewable Energy Project, a Washington, D.C., research and policy organization.

"There's potentially a lot of benefit for older industrial firms in this country in making the components for the turbines, too. There's a lot of work to be done to be able to ramp up domestic production of these very complex machines."

Not everyone loves wind farms, however. Some human neighbors, mostly in the East, say they're noisy and unsightly.

Owners of vacation homes on Cape Cod are battling a proposal to build 130 offshore wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, both on environmental and aesthetic grounds.

Some wildlife advocates say they endanger birds, at least in critical flyways such as California's Altamont Pass, site of one of the nation's oldest wind farms.

Protocols call for review of wind farm sites by federal and state wildlife officials, along with state and local permitting and zoning requirements.

The would-be developers of a proposed offshore wind farm near Padre Island in South Texas are sponsoring a two-year study to weigh the threat turbines might pose to migratory birds, and how the blades might be shut down automatically if weather conditions arise that would force flocks to fly low through the complex.

Critics also say the giant whirling towers are a blight to the landscape on mountaintops and other spots.

Officials in places such as Somerset County, Pa., where the turbines of one wind farm tower beside the Pennsylvania Turnpike, say the windmills are more of a tourist attraction than turnoff. Some local resorts organize field trips to see them.

Officials in Texas and Oklahoma have established the American Wind Power Trail along a 600-mile corridor that links historic windmills and windmill museums with stops at modern wind farms and wind power manufacturers in nearly two dozen cities and towns.